James Hilton: Collected Novels by James Hilton
We have now been at war for almost six months, and though it would be premature to offer ourselves any congratulations, nevertheless we may justifiably wonder whether the Germans are able to do so either. True, their tanks and mechanized armies have scored victories over the farm carts and cavalry of Poland, but at the cost of overrunning that country they have brought against them a factor which, with memories of a quarter of a century ago, must chill the blood of even the most ardent Nazi—namely, THE FULL FIGHTING STRENGTH OF ENGLAND AND FRANCE. For today that strength is assembled, not in a line of half-flooded trenches hastily improvised, but along the mightiest system of steel and concrete fortifications ever constructed by man—THE MAGINOT LINE. No wonder that the Nazi Juggernaut has satisfied itself with triumphs elsewhere. No wonder that (as some people are whispering, almost as if there were a mystery about it)—“nothing is happening” on the Western Front. If nothing is happening, then surely that is the measure of our victory, and of the enemy’s defeat. For that is precisely what the Maginot Line was built for—in order THAT NOTHING SHOULD HAPPEN.
George thought this rather good, for it rationalized something that had begun to puzzle even himself slightly—that so-called phony war. But of course the Maginot Line was the clue. A high military officer had shown him some photographs of it—after which the whole business became no puzzle at all.
A pity the general public couldn’t clear their minds in the same way, but naturally the photographs were secret; and it was to substitute for them, in a sense, that George had felt impelled to write his editorial.
Perhaps as a result of this, he wrote fewer editorials after the war ceased to be phony. For one thing, he was overworked, and if he ever found himself with an hour to spare he preferred to drop in at St. Patrick’s to see Father Wendover, who had long been his best friend. As George had somehow suspected from the first, Wendover was not only agile-minded but considerably sympathetic to George’s work in the town. He had always held what were considered “advanced” ideas for a priest, with the result that he more often had to defend himself for being one than for having them; and that, he claimed, was as good for him as for his opponents.
Such controversies had flourished in peacetime, and George had often joined in them; during the war, however, and especially after the Norwegian fiasco and the French collapse, nothing seemed to matter but the bare facts of life and death, disaster and survival, enemy and friend. And George found Wendover congenial because, beneath the surface of the proud ecclesiastic, there lay a deep humility which, in a curious way, matched his own. Thus it was to Wendover that George took his thoughts during the difficult days of 1940, and there was one day, just after Dunkirk, when he brought over some notes of a speech he was due to make to a local patriotic organization. He wanted to know what Wendover thought about it
And the latter, while he was listening, smiled slightly. Here was George Boswell, Mayor of Browdley—this decent, hardworking, well-meaning, quite talented fellow—a good citizen and a stouthearted friend—a man whose powers of leadership were considerable and might have been greater had he not been so personally likable, and had he not liked to be so likable—here was George Boswell, with the Germans poised along the European coast line from Narvik to Bordeaux, thinking it really mattered what he said to a few hundred people gathered together in Browdley Co-operative Hall. But then, as an honest man, Wendover had to admit that a similar comment might have been made on his own sermons at such a time…for were George’s speeches of any less practical importance? So he listened patiently and said, at the end: “Not bad, George—not bad at all. Cheerful, anyhow.”
“You mean it’s too cheerful?”
“Well, you always were an optimist, weren’t you?” Then he smiled, but it was rather a grim, troubled smile. “You know, George, I don’t want to discourage you, but things do look pretty bad. We’ve lost our army and all its equipment, and we’ve about one plane for every ten the Germans have, and the Channel’s only a ditch nowadays…”
George’s eyes widened with a sort of bewilderment, “Aye, I’ve thought of all that myself. I’ve even wondered—some-times—if they’ve got a chance.”
“You mean to invade us?”
“Aye.”
“They might have. Recognizing the fact shouldn’t alter our resolve to fight to the last man. On the contrary, it’s the basis of it.”
George swallowed hard, then said, after a pause of gloomy thoughtfulness: “So it boils down to this—we might even lose the bloody war?”
“I think we’d be fools to assume that it’s impossible. But of course I don’t say we shall. I’m only speaking the thoughts that came into my mind while I was listening to you—perhaps because you have been wrong before when you’ve made such gallant prophecies.”
George suddenly stuffed the notes of his speech into his pocket. “Then by God I’ll be wrong again!” he almost shouted. “After all, as you say, I’ve got no reputation to lose. Aye, and I’ll not do it by halves either! I’ll tell folks that Hitler’s on the verge of his first great defeat, and that whatever else the Germans succeed in, they’ll never lick England!”
So George did this, and it was among his most quotable prophetic utterances. It was certainly the only one he had ever conquered a qualm about, and one of the very few that proved completely correct.
But as the summer months passed and the air assaults that had been expected a year before began now upon London and the large provincial cities, it became clear that this was not like the First World War, when every rostrum and pulpit had resounded to the call of a somewhat romantic patriotism. George could remember the mayor of that day orating in Browdley market square about the injustices of poor little Belgium, and thereafter luring recruits from the audience as a revivalist preacher extracts penitents. Thank goodness we don’t have that to do, thought George more than once as he began his work on those fateful autumn days; and besides, it wasn’t poor little Belgium any more, but poor little England—yet was there any Englishman who wouldn’t somehow resent that phrase? Why, even poor little Browdley didn’t seem to suit. Indeed, as George went about his wartime business in the town, visiting factories and homes and organizations, it seemed to him it had never been less “poor,” in any sense of the word. And it wasn’t so little either. One day, in company with other local mayors, he was taken up in an R.A.F. plane (his first flight), and when he stared down from three thousand feet upon the roofs of the town, he couldn’t, help exclaiming: “Why, it looks like a city!” To which an Air Force officer replied: “Let’s hope it doesn’t, or it’ll be put on the blitz list.” For Browdley had so far escaped, though bombs had fallen in the neighborhood at several places.
And there were other curious things about the war—for instance, that even with all the new food-rationing restrictions, many Browdley families were being better fed than in peacetime, because they now had full employment and money to spend. And the children in the schools, so the Medical Officer reported, were actually healthier than ever before in the history of the town.
It was nervous tension that weighed most heavily during that first terrible year of the real war—the loss of sleep through air-raid warnings even if the raiders did not come or merely passed over; the extra hours of work without holidays, the ten-hour shifts plus overtime of men and women desperately striving to repair the losses at Dunkirk; the irritations of tired folk waiting in long lines for buses to and from their factories; the continual wear and tear on older persons and those of weaker fiber. But on others the tensions, hardships, occasional dangers, and ever-present awareness of possible danger, seemed to have a toughening effect; many men who had worked all day found they were no worse off attending Home Guard drills in the evenings or patrolling the streets as air-raid wardens than they would have been in the pubs and cinemas of their peacetime choice. And in this George discovered (to his surprise, for he had never taken deliberate exercise and had rarely given his physical condition a thought) that he belonged to the tou
A few things gave him emotions in which pleasure, if it could be called that, came from an ironic appreciation of events. For instance, that the old Channing Mill in Mill Street had at last found a use; its unwanted machinery was junked for scrap metal, while its large ground floor, leveled off, served as a headquarters and mess room for the air-raid wardens.
And also that Richard Felsby’s land, which the old man had decided too late to give the town for a municipal park, had been compulsorily requisitioned for the drills and maneuverings of the Home Guard.
But no use could be found for Stoneclough. It remained a derelict in even greater solitude now that there were no holidays to tempt Browdley folks on hikes and picnics.
George was an exceedingly busy man. Not only was his printing business getting all the work it could handle, but his position as Mayor counted for more and more as the national and local governments of the country became closely integrated. For the first time in his life he had the feeling that he really represented the town, not merely his own party on the Town Council; and it was a satisfactory feeling, especially as his tasks were far too numerous to permit him to luxuriate in it. He was not a luxuriator, anyhow. And when he came home after a fourteen-hour spell of work, it was rarely with time left over to indulge a mood. He did not even read in his study most nights, but made himself a cup of tea and went immediately to bed and to sleep.
The ordeal of the great cities continued. Night after night the wail of sirens and thudding of gunfire wakened Browdley, and sometimes a wide glow on one of the horizons gave a clue as to which of the greater near-by cities were being attacked. One night there came an emergency call for help from Mulcaster, and George accompanied several truckloads of Browdley men in a top-speed drive to the stricken area. Till then all his fire fighting and similar work had been a rehearsal; but that night, from soon after midnight till long past dawn, he knew what the real thing was, and of course, like all real things, it was different. Crawling into smoking ruins while bombs were still falling in the neighborhood, giving first aid to the injured before a doctor could arrive, he directed his squad of co-workers under conditions which, despite all the training they had had, were in a dreadful and profound sense novel.
A youngish doctor asked him when the raid was over: “Been in this sort of thing before?”
George shook his head.
“I’d have thought you had, from the way you handled those stretchers.”
“Oh, I’ve done that before.”
“The last war?”
“Aye.”
“How would you compare it—this sort of thing—and that?”
George answered irritably: “I wouldn’t. And nor would you if you could.”
The men returned to Browdley with scorched and blackened faces, minor injuries, and a grim weariness of soul which, after sleep, changed to bitterness, determination, cheerfulness, even ribaldry—so strange is the alchemy of experience on men of differing make-up.
On George, after that first irritable outburst (which he later regretted as being needlessly melodramatic and quite out of character), the principal effect was a decision to do something which, at any previous time, would have been an acknowledgement of defeat, but which now, the way he could look at it, seemed more like victory over himself. He gave up the Guardian. He did not even try to sell it; he abandoned it. For years it had never more than just paid its way, and sometimes not even that; but the real issue, in George’s mind, was not financial at all. He suddenly realized that the paper had been costing too much in human effort, including his own, that could better be devoted elsewhere.
“It’s one thing with another,” he explained to Wendover. “Will Spivey’s getting old—it’s all he can do to manage the job printing—I’ll have to keep that going, of course—it’s my living. And then there’ve been newsprint difficulties, and you can’t get paper boys any more, and I’ve just lost another man to the Army…And besides all that, I haven’t the time myself nowadays. If we should get a big raid on Browdley one of these nights, we’d all have our hands full. I know what I’m talking about, after what I saw in Mulcaster. Because I’d be responsible for things here, in a sort of way. There’s a lot more work in being Mayor than there used to be.”
“And I haven’t heard any complaints about how you’re doing it, George.”
“I’ll do it better, though, when the paper’s off my hands.”
“You’re sure you won’t regret not being an editor any more?”
“Editor?” George grinned. “What did I edit? Births, marriages, funerals, meetings, whist drives, church bazaars. The Advertiser’ll do that just as well—and one paper’s enough in a town of this size. Most folks always did prefer the Advertiser, anyway.”
“But you used to write your own stuff in the Guardian sometimes.”
“Aye, and there you come to another reason why I’m giving it up. D’you remember when I came to talk to you about that speech I made just after Dunkirk?”
“You mean the one in which you prophesied that Hitler would never lick us? Yes, I remember. And I’m beginning to think you were right.”
“For once. But as you said, I’d been pretty wrong before. I’m glad you said that because it made me think about it, and I never realized how wrong I actually had been till the other day I got out the back files of the Guardian and reread some of my old editorials. By God, they were wrong. After Locarno, for instance, I wrote about France and Germany finally burying the hatchet, and after Munich I said that even though the settlement wasn’t perfect, at any rate it might keep the peace of Europe for a generation…and only a few months ago I was blabbing that the Germans couldn’t break through in the west because of the Maginot Line…Mind you, I was always perfectly sincere at the time, but that only makes it worse. Seems to me, Harry, I’m just not cut out to deal with world affairs.”
“You’ve been as right as a good many of the politicians.”
“Aye, and that’s no compliment. Maybe it was a good thing I never got to Westminster—I’d have been just another fool with a bigger platform to spout from…And another thing occurred to me—I was thinking about it last night on warden’s duty—and it’s this—that the nearer I stay to Browdley the more use I am and the fewer mistakes I make. Look round the place—I have done some good things—not many, not enough—but they’re here, such as they are, and I don’t have to try to forget ’em same as I do the stuff I used to put in the paper…Look at the Mill Street Housing Scheme, and the new Council School, and the Municipal Hospital, and the electric power station the Government took over. Aye, and the sewage farm, if you like—that’s mine too—remember what a fight I had over it? Those things are real, Harry—they exist—they’re something attempted, something done. They’re what I’ve been right about, whereas Czechoslovakia’s something I’ve been wrong about. So give me Browdley.”
“You’ve got Browdley, George.”
“Aye, and it’s got me. Till the war’s over, anyhow.”
“And afterwards, perhaps.”
“Don’t be too sure. There’s young chaps coming along as’ll make me a back number someday, but they’re in uniform now, most of ’em…‘Vot
Future’—that was my old election slogan. I hope nobody else remembers it. I’d rather be remembered for the lavatories I put in the market square. Because they’re good lavatories, as lavatories go. Whereas the children’s future that I talked so much about…”
Wendover smiled. “I get your point, George. But don’t oversimplify it. And don’t throw all your books on world affairs in the fire.”
“Oh no, I won’t do that. In fact when I’ve got the time I’ll study more of ’em. I want to find out why we’ve all been let in for what we have. And I want to find out why folks ten times better educated than me have made the same mistakes.”
“Maybe because education hasn’t much to do with it, George.” Wendover added: “And another thing—don’t be too humble about yourself.”
George thought a moment, then came out with one of those, devastatingly sincere things that endeared him to his opponents even oftener than to his friends. “Oh, don’t you worry—I’m not as humble as I sound. That’s what Livia once said.”
He did not often mention her now, and when he did the name slipped out casually, by accident, giving him neither embarrassment nor a pang. So much time can do.
But the remark gave Wendover the cue to ask: “By the way, heard anything of her lately?”
“No, I suppose she’s still out there.”
And then, after a silence, the subject was changed.
Even in Browdley by now the affair was almost forgotten, and George could assess with some impartiality the extent to which it had damaged his career. Probably it had lost him his chance at the general election of 1923, though his subsequent failure at two other Parliamentary elections might well have happened in any case. Undoubtedly the divorce had alienated some of his early supporters, especially when (due to the legal technique of such things in those days) it had been made to seem that he himself was the guilty party. Many of his friends knew this to be untrue, but a few did not, and it was always a matter liable to be brought up by an unscrupulous opponent, like the old accusation that he had put his wife on the municipal payroll. But time had had its main effect, not so much in dulling memories, but in changing the moral viewpoints even of those who imagined theirs to be least changeable, so that the whole idea of divorce, which had been a shocking topic in the twenties, was now, in the forties, rather a stale one. George knew that a great many young people in the town neither knew nor would have been much interested in the details that had so scandalized their parents.